World War II bomb defused in Viterbo, after four hours of apprehension

The operations to defuse the 2-ton bomb dating back to the Second World War were concluded just before 3pm, for which, this morning, three-fifths of the resident population of the city were evacuated. Viterbo. Thirty-six thousand people of the 66 thousand that make up the population of the capital of Tuscia, from 6 this morning, began to leave the homes that fell within the security perimeter, with a radius of 1,400 meters, from the site of the discovery of the bomb in via Alcide De Gasperi. Gas and electricity supplies were interrupted. At 10.25am, the team of ten bomb disposal experts from the VI Pioneer Engineering Regiment of the Italian Army began defusing the bomb while the police patrolled the areas of the evacuated portion of the city to avoid looting. The bomb squad worked to “remove the three fuses, the bomb activation devices, all activated and armed”, the Army explained. “Once these were neutralized, the war remnant was transported to the 80th Rome regiment” – they add – where it was rendered harmless with the leaching technique, which involves emptying the bomb using high-temperature water jets, capable of dissolve the explosive and convey it to a filtering system, in order to separate the compound, for the subsequent destruction of the explosive”.

In 2023, the bomb disposal units of the engineering regiments “conducted 2,356 interventions throughout the national territory – the Army continues -, neutralizing 12,666 war remnants of which 21 aircraft bombs dating back to world conflicts”. The bomb, with a diameter of 76 centimeters, 2.08 meters long and a thickness of 0.77 centimeters, contains over 1,300 kilos of explosives inside. The 2,000 kilo bomb is of the largest type and is the sixth found in Italy. To limit the evacuation area and the resulting inconvenience to the local population, the military created a containment structure capable of mitigating the possible effects due to a possible accidental explosion during the delicate defusing activities. “This made it possible to reduce the clearance radius to just 1,400 metres. The distances are the result of recent studies and experiments carried out by the Counter-Improvised Explosive Devices Center of Excellence in Rome”, conclude the Army.

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